If you follow me on twitter you know I am not a fan of Tyler Bozak and I have written about him in the past. As a Leaf fan I want to keep writing about his poor play because I really do not want to see him re-signed in Toronto. He isn’t a good player and simple does not deserve it, especially if he is going to be making upwards of $4M/yr on a 4+ year long contract. Let’s take a look at how he ranks in a variety of categories over the previous 3 seasons combined as well as this season.

Statistic

3yr

2012-13

5v5 G/60

219/324

130/310

5v5 A/60

168/324

144/310

5v5 Pts/60

199/324

139/310

5v5 IGP

265/324

195/310

5v5 IAP

202/324

221/310

5v5 IPP

288/324

268/310

5v5 FF20

155/324

173/310

5v5 FA20

319/324

309/310

5v5 FF%

275/324

291/310

5v4 G/60

116/155

57/147

5v4 A/60

144/155

98/147

5v4 Pts/60

150/155

89/147

5v4 IGP

76/155

66/147

5v4 IAP

131/155

110/147

5v4 IPP

139/155

114/147

The above are his rankings among other forwards (i.e. 219/324 means 219th among 324 forwards with >1500 5v5 3yr minutes, >300 5v5 2012-13 minutes, >400 5v4 3yr minutes and >75 5v4 2012-13 minutes. 2012-13 stats for games up to but not including last nights). For 5v5 ice time we are essentially talking the top 10-11 forwards on each team, or their regulars and on the power play we are talking the top 5 forwards in PP ice time per team.

In 3-year 5v5 goals, assists and points per 60 minutes of play Tyler Bozak is ranking approximately the equivalent of a good 3rd line player. The thing is, he is doing that while playing on the first line but his terrible IGP, IAP, and IPP numbers indicate he is doing a terrible job keeping pace with his fellow first line mates. If you look at his 3 year fenwick numbers (FF20, FA20 and FF%) which are on-ice stats you see when Tyler Bozak has been on the ice the Leafs have been mediocre at shot generation and terrible at shot prevention. Only a handful (literally, just 5 players) have a worse shot prevention record when they are on the ice.

On the power play things aren’t much better. He is second powerplay unit material at best but he is near the bottom of the pack in every assist and point generation and only a bit better in goal production.

Overall his numbers look a little better in 2012-13 but they certainly aren’t much to write home about, especially his IGP, IAP and IPP. He still looks to be a 3rd line offensive player with terrible defensive ability.

Another thing we can look at is his WOWY numbers with his most frequent line mate Phil Kessel.

Bozak w/Kessel

Bozak wo/ Kessel

3yr GF20

0.874

0.648

3yr GA20

0.995

1.297

3yr GF%

46.8%

33.3%

3yr CF20

19.60

17.43

3yr CA20

20.89

20.82

3yr CF%

48.4%

45.6%

2012-13 GF20

0.956

0.000

2012-13 GA20

0.918

0.419

2012-13 GF%

51.0%

0.0%

2012-13 CF20

19.50

8.38

2012-13 CA20

21.53

25.55

2012-13 CF%

47.5%

24.7%

When Phil Kessel and Tyler Bozak are on the ice together they are not even breaking even. When Tyler Bozak is on the ice without Kessel they are significantly worse. Individually, Tyler Bozak has scored just 3 of his 26 5v5 goals (11.5%) and 8 of his 68 points (11.8%) over the previous 3 seasons when separated from Kessel despite playing nearly 20% of his ice time apart from Kessel. When not with Kessel his goal and point production drops significantly and as we know from above it wasn’t all that impressive to start with.

Not shown are Phil Kessel’s numbers when he isn’t playing with Tyler Bozak but they are generally better than when they are together. Phil Kessel when not playing with Tyler Bozak has a GF% of 50.4% and a CF% of 51.5% over the previous 3 seasons. Tyler Bozak appears to be a drag on Kessel’s offense.

The only argument you can for keeping Bozak is that the Kessel-Bozak-Lupul/JVR line has been productive and is working so why break them up. To me that argument only works when Bozak is making $1.5M and is not a significant drag on the salary cap but you can’t be paying a player $3.5-4M to essentially be a place holder between Kessel and Lupul/JVR.

(I am going to try and include a glossary in my posts for advanced statistics mentioned in the post so those not familiar with advanced stats can find out what they mean but a full glossary can also be found here).

Glossary

G/60 – Goals scored per 60 minutes of play

A/60 – Assists per 60 minutes of play

Pts/60 – Points per 60 minutes of play

IGP – Percentage of teams goals while player was on ice that were scored by the player

IAP – Percentage of teams goals while player was on the ice that the player had an assist on

IPP – Percentage of teams goals while player was on the ice that player scored or had an assist on

FF20 – Fenwick (shots + missed shots) by team per 20 minutes of ice time

FA20 – Fenwick (shots + missed shots) against team per 20 minutes of ice time

FF% – % of all shot attempts (shots + missed shots) while on ice that the players team took – FF/(FF+FA)

GF20, GA20, GF% – same as FF20, FA20, FF% except for goals

CF20, CA20, CF% – same as FF20, FA20, FF% but also includes shot attempts that were blocked (corsi)

The Toronto Maple Leafs shooting percentage has been predicted to fall for a couple of months now but it has held steady. I know that about 5-6 weeks ago the Leafs 5v5 shooting percentage was at 10.4% and I predicted it was sure to fall but as of this morning their 5v5 shooting percentage is even higher at 10.59%. Here is a graph of their 5v5 shooting percentage through out the season.

Toronto Maple Leafs 2012-13 Shooting % (shots across x-axis)

League average 5v5 shooting percentage is normally just shy of 8% and the Leafs are about 33% higher than that which is incredibly high. Over the previous 5 seasons only one team has maintained a 5v5 shooting percentage above 10% over the course of an 82 game season and that was the Washington Capitals in 2009-10 when they shot at a 10.39% clip and only a handful of teams have managed to post a 5v5 shooting percentage above 9%. What the Leafs are doing is quite extraordinary even if it is a shortened season. Only 13.4% of the running 50 shot shooting percentage data points in the above graph fall below the typical league average of 8% so about 86.6% of the time they are at or above average in shooting percentage.

The only other team with a 5v5 shooting percentage above 10% this season is the Tampa Bay Lighting but they have been falling back a bit lately and in danger of falling below the 10% line as they currently sit at 10.01%.

Barring a collapse the Leafs should almost certainly end the season with a shooting percentage above 10% but it is difficult to know how much of it is luck/circumstance/randomness and how much is truly skill.

Yesterday HabsEyesOnThePrize.com had a post on the importance of fenwick come playoff time over the past 5 seasons. It is definitely worth a look so go check it out. In the post they look at FF% in 5v5close situations and see how well it translates into post season success. I wanted to take this a step further and take a look at PDO and GF% in 5v5close situations to see of they translate into post season success as well. Here is what I found:

Group

N

Avg

Playoff Avg

Cup Winners

Lost Cup Finals

Lost Third Round

Lost Second Round

Lost First Round

Missed Playoffs

GF% > 55

19

2.68

2.83

5

1

2

6

4

1

GF% 50-55

59

1.22

1.64

0

2

6

10

26

15

GF% 45-50

52

0.62

1.78

0

2

2

4

10

34

GF% <45

20

0.00

-

0

0

0

0

0

20

FF% > 53

23

2.35

2.35

3

2

4

5

9

0

FF% 50-53

55

1.15

1.70

2

2

1

10

22

18

FF% 47-50

46

0.52

1.85

0

0

4

3

6

33

FF% <47

26

0.54

2.00

0

1

1

2

3

19

PDO >1010

27

1.63

2.20

2

2

2

6

8

7

PDO 1000-1010

42

1.17

1.75

1

0

5

7

15

14

PDO 990-1000

47

0.91

1.95

2

1

3

4

12

25

PDO <990

34

0.56

1.90

0

2

0

3

5

24

I have grouped GF%, FF% and PDO into four categories each, the very good, the good, the mediocre and the bad and I have looked at how many teams made it to each round of the playoffs from each group. If we say that winning the cup is worth 5 points, getting to the finals is worth 4, getting to the 3rd round is worth 3, getting to the second round is worth 2, and making the playoffs is worth 1, then the Avg column is the average point total for the teams in that grouping. The Playoff Avg is the average point total for teams that made the playoffs.

As HabsEyesOnThePrize.com found, 5v5close FF% is definitely an important factor in making the playoffs and enjoying success in the playoffs. That said, GF% seems to be slightly more significant. All 5 Stanley Cup winners came from the GF%>55 group while only 3 cup winners came from the FF%>53 group and both Avg and PlayoffAvg are higher in the GF%>55 group than the FF%>53 group. PDO only seems marginally important, though teams that have a very good PDO do have a slightly better chance to go deeper into the playoffs. Generally speaking though, if you are trying to predict a Stanley Cup winner, looking at 5v5close GF% is probably a better metric than looking at 5v5close FF% and certainly better than PDO. Now, considering this is a significantly shorter season than usual, this may not be the case as luck may be a bit more of a factor in GF% than usual but historically this has been the case.

So, who should we look at for playoff success this season? Well, there are currently 9 teams with a 5v5close GF% > 55. Those are Anaheim, Boston, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Montreal, Chicago, San Jose, Toronto and Vancouver. No other teams are above 52.3% so that is a list unlikely to get any new additions to it before seasons end though some could certainly fall out of the above 55% list. Now if we also only consider teams that have a 5v5close FF% >50% then Toronto and Anaheim drop off the list leaving you with Boston, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Montreal, Chicago, San Jose and Vancouver as your Stanley Cup favourites, but we all pretty much knew that already didn’t we?

A few people didn’t like that I suggested that Jay McClement was a bad player in yesterday’s Mikhail Grabovski post so I thought I would provide a visual representation of McClement’s mediocrity in the form of 5v5 Zone Start adjusted CF% WOWY charts for each of the past 6 seasons (this season included).

Let’s start with this current season even though the sample size is relatively small and so the number of line mates with a reasonable number of minutes with McClement is relatively small.

In this chart, it is better for McClement to have the bubbles below and to the right of the diagional line indicating his teammates corsi for % improved when they were on the ice with McClement. As you can see, none did.

Mikhail Grabovski is starting to get a little heat in Toronto. The other night against Winnipeg he benched for a good chunk of the game and people are starting to question what is wrong with Grabovski this season. Truth is, there is probably nothing wrong with Grabovski except for his line mate Jay McClement.

When one looks at Grabovski’s stats this season you will actually see that his 5v5 Goals/60 is actually up this year to 0.946 goals per 60 minutes of play from 0.895 last year and 0.924 the year before so his 5v5 goal production is certainly there. It is his assist totals that are down dramatically. The problem is his most frequent line mates are Nikolai Kulemin, Jay McClement and Leo Komarov, none of which are dynamic offensive players. McClement has never scored more than 12 goals in any season in his career and Kulemen had a 30 goal season in 2010-11 but never more than 16 otherwise and has just 9 goals in his last 97 games and Komarov is a rookie not known for his offensive ability. You can’t expect Grabovski, who probably isn’t a dynamic playmaking center to start with, to rack up a lot of assists with a pair of third line players on his wing.

In summary, there is nothing wrong with Grabovski. It is the coach that took a good player who had very good ‘chemistry’ with Grabovski off Grabovski’s line replacing him with at best a mediocre 3rd liner to go with the other 3rd liner on his other wing. Maybe when Lupul comes back Carlyle will be forced to put a real top 6 winger on the Grabovski line and then people will stop asking “What is wrong with Grabovski?” but until then, blame Jay McClement (with a primary assist to Randy Carlyle).

Yesterday I posted an article on comparable players to Tyler Bozak so today I thought I’d tackle the Maple Leafs other key free agent forward, Clarke MacArthur. As with Bozak, I first looked at the offensive stats Goals/60, FirstAssists/60, Primary Points/60 and Primary Points % (percentage of goals scored while on the ice that the player had a goal or a first assist on). Here is a list of offensively comparable wingers:

Player Name

G/60

FirstA/60

PPts/60

PPts%

TLUSTY, JIRI

1.094

0.501

1.595

53.01%

PERRON, DAVID

0.991

0.521

1.512

55.75%

MACARTHUR, CLARKE

0.979

0.513

1.492

55.20%

SYKORA, PETR

0.916

0.593

1.509

56.01%

MOULSON, MATT

0.898

0.647

1.545

54.44%

SIMMONDS, WAYNE

0.891

0.563

1.454

59.61%

PARISE, ZACH

0.875

0.533

1.408

58.74%

OKPOSO, KYLE

0.867

0.591

1.458

59.71%

MALONE, RYAN

0.844

0.619

1.463

53.06%

MCGINN, JAMIE

0.796

0.703

1.499

57.10%

PARENTEAU, PIERRE

0.659

0.931

1.59

59.42%

The above list was selected for similar PPts/60 and PPts% to MacArthur and then sorted by G/60 and identifies the most comparable offensive players to MacArthur. McGinn and Parenteau are not the goal scorers of MacArthur and the others so probably deserve to be dropped from the list.

As an aside, it is quite hilarious to think that the Minnesota Wild have committed nearly $100M over 13 years to Parise when Parise’s best offensive comparable the past year+ is Kyle Okposo. The Wild better hope Parise gets back to his 2008-09 and 2009-10 form when he scored 83 goals and 176 points over that 2 year period or else they are spending a ton of money for a second tier winger.

So, what about defensively? In the Bozak article, to evaluate players defensively I looked at their corsi against per 20 minutes relative to their teammates corsi against per 20 minutes and suggested any players that improved their teammates corsi against is probably a decent defensive player. Here is how that comparison looked for MacArthur.

Player Name

CA20

TMCA20

CA20/TMCA20

MACARTHUR, CLARKE

18.634

19.686

0.947

PARENTEAU, PIERRE

18.782

19.269

0.975

PARISE, ZACH

15.671

15.904

0.985

SYKORA, PETR

14.741

14.567

1.012

MOULSON, MATT

19.445

19.112

1.017

MCGINN, JAMIE

19.053

18.678

1.020

OKPOSO, KYLE

19.398

18.983

1.022

PERRON, DAVID

16.821

16.247

1.035

SIMMONDS, WAYNE

19.346

18.558

1.042

MALONE, RYAN

19.422

18.539

1.048

TLUSTY, JIRI

20.576

19.400

1.061

The list is sorted by CA20/TMCA20 and the lower the number the greater they improved their teammates corsi against rate. In this list, MacArthur comes out on top which is a suggestion that he is probably a good defensive player, or at minimum not a defensive liability. Since Perron, Parise and Sykora have significantly better defensive teammates it is more difficult for them to improve their teammates CA20 so I am not convinced that MacArthur is better than them, but MacArthur’s defensive numbers look good.

So, with that in mind, what is MacArthur worth? Ignoring the Zach Parise comparison, he is probably worth in the $3-4M/yr range. Matt Moulson is in the middle of a 3 year deal worth a little over $3.1M/yr. Okposo is in the second year of a 5 year RFA deal paying him $2.8M/yr. Wayne Simmonds signed a long term extension at just shy of $4M/yr. Parenteau signed as a UFA in Colorado for 4 years at $4M/yr. David Perron signed an RFA deal that pays him an average of just over $3.8M. Ryan Malone is in the middle of a contract that is paying him $4.5M/yr.

For me, I would like to see the Leafs sign MacArthur to a 4 year contract extension, preferably in the $3.5-4M/yr range. That would be a fair contract for both sides.

Over the past few years I have had a few discussions with other Leaf fans about the relative merits of Francois Beauchemin. Many Leaf fans argue that he was a good 2-way defenseman who can play tough minutes and is the kind of defenseman the Leafs are still in need of. I on the other hand have never had quite as optimistic view of Beauchemin and I don’t think he would make this team any better.

On some level I think a part of the difference in opinion is that many look at his corsi numbers which aren’t too bad but I prefer to look at his goal numbers which have generally not been so good. So, let’s take a look at Beauchemin’s WOWY numbers and see if there is in fact a divergence between Beauchemin’s corsi WOWY numbers and his goal WOWY numbers starting with 2009-11 5v5 WOWY starting with CF% WOWY.

I have included a diagonal line which is kind of a ‘neutral’ line where players perform equally well with and without Beauchemin. Anything to the right/below the line indicates the player played better with Beauchemin than without and anything to the left/above they played worse with Beauchemin. As you can see, the majority of players had a better CF% with Beauchemin than without. Now, let’s take a look at GF% WOWY.

While a handful of players had better GF% with Beauchemin, the majority were a little worse off. There is a clear difference between Beauchemin’s CF% WOWY and his GF% WOWY. What is interesting is this difference can be observed in 2007-08, 2009-10, 2010-11, and 2011-12 (he was injured for much of 2008-09 so his WOWY data is not reliable due to smaller sample size). Looking at his 5-year WOWY charts you get a clear picture that Beauchemin seemingly has a skill for ‘driving play’ but not ‘driving goals’. Let’s dig a little further to see if we can determine what his ‘problem’ by looking at his 2009-11 two year CF20, GF20, CA20 and GA20 WOWY’s.

CF20:

GF20:

As you can clearly see, Beauchemin appears to be much better at generating shots and shot attempts than he is at generating goals. The majority of players have a higher corsi for rate when with Beauchemin than when not with Beauchemin but the majority also have a lower goals for rate. What about ‘against’ rates?

CA20:

GA20:

For CA20 and GA20 is is better to be to be above/left of the diagional line because unlike GF%/CF%/GF20/CF20 it is better to have a smaller number than a larger number. There doesn’t seem to be quite as much of a difference between CA20 and GA20 as with CF20 and GF20 so the difference between CF% and GF% is driven by the inability to convert shots and shot attempts into goals as opposed to the defensive side of the game. That said, there is no clear evidence that Beauchemin makes his teammates any better defensively.

There are two points I wanted to make with this post.

Leaf fans probably shouldn’t be missing Beauchemin.

For a lot of players a corsi evaluation of that player will give you a reasonable evaluation of that player but there are also many players where a corsi evaluation of that player will not tell the complete story. Some players can consistently see a divergence between their goal stats and their corsi stats and it is important to take that into consideration.

Ok, let me justify that headline a little before people get all over me. He isn’t completely terrible as in he shouldn’t be in the league terrible. He’s just a terrible first line center, and probably not a very good second or third line center either (at least not until he improves defensively). He’d be an OK 4th liner and injury fill in depth player at close to minimum salary. Let me explain.

The last 2 seasons Bozak has mostly played with Phil Kessel and Joffrey Lupul became his second winger when he joined the Leafs. Those are two pretty solid wingers to play with so lets look at Bozak’s production with those two solid players.

I want to compare Bozak to other top 9 players and conveniently if we look at all forwards with 1250 minutes of 5v5 zone start adjusted ice time over the past 2 seasons we come up with 270 players which is precisely an average of 9 per team, or 3 lines per team. So, how does Bozak rank among these players?

So, despite playing predominately with first line players his individual offensive stats are at a 3rd line level.

So, what about PP situations? There are 169 forwards with 250 5v4 PP minutes over the previous two seasons while Bozak has played 417:28 which puts him among the top 65 forwards in the league. How has Bozak fared?

Think about that for a minute. Of 169 forwards with >250 5v4 PP minutes over the past 2 seasons he ranks 5th last in shots/60 and has the 30th worst first assists/60 rankings. That means he is playing on the PP but isn’t shooting much and isn’t a primary set up man for the shooters either.

The only redeeming factors for Bozak is that he seems to be developing into a really good face off guy and he seems to be able to play with an elevated shooting percentage. His 5v5 ZS adjusted shooting percentage ranks 30th of 270 over the past 2 seasons while his 5v4 PP shooting percentage ranks 14th of 169. If you look at Bozak’s shot locations for last season you will see that the majority of Bozak’s shots and goals come from close in and 5 of his 11 5v5 goals last season came on rebounds.

So, to summarize, Tyler Bozak doesn’t shoot much, isn’t a great playmaker, isn’t good defensively (explained elsewhere) and yet coaches seem to insist on using him as a first line center. His main contribution to a team is winning face offs and going to the opposing teams net waiting for the puck to come to him so he can pot an easy close in goal. It is not completely unreasonable to believe that a guy like David Steckel could give you as good or better performance on face offs and similar lackluster offensive results with better defensive play if given the same opportunities to play with top end players that Tyler Bozak has had. That isn’t to say I want Steckel to be the Leafs new first line center, I was just trying to put Bozak’s usefulness (or lack of) into perspective.

Before Leaf fans get all over me, let me say that there is nothing wrong with being a complementary player. Every team has and needs them and they can be valuable pieces of the puzzle. When I say complementary player I mean he is a player that needs others to help him get the most out of his game rather than someone who can elevate his game and those around him on his own. The complementary player isn’t as valuable as the guy who can elevate his game and the game of his line mates on his own (I call this a core player) but every good team needs a good cast of complementary players. Let me explain further with this chart of 2007-12 (5yr) even strength 5v5 data.

Sh%

TOI/G

with Savard

13.9%

39:40

without Savard

8.9%

61:08

with Lupul

12.8%

46:34

without Lupul

9.1%

58:46

with Savard or Lupul

13.3%

43:07

without Savard or Lupul

7.7%

68:44

In my opinion, the two best (offensive) players that Kessel has played with over his career are Marc Savard and Joffrey Lupul so I focused on Kessel’s play with and without them. In the chart above, you can clearly see that Kessel has been substantially better when he is on the ice with either Savard or Lupul and in reality somewhat ordinary otherwise. When those two guys are on the ice Kessel’s shooting percentage, and thus goal production, sky rockets. Whatever Savard and Lupul are doing, they make Phil Kessel better. Does that make Savard and Lupul core players and Kessel a complementary player? Maybe. Let’s take a closer look at Lupul and see if his boost in Kessel’s performance extends to some of the other line mates he has had over the years (again, using 5 year 5v5 shooting percentages).

Linemate

with Lupul

without Lupul

Phil Kessel

12.8%

9.1%

Tyler Bozak

12.9%

13.4%

Scott Hartnell

12.1%

9.3%

Jeff Carter

12.4%

9.2%

Mike Richards

14.3%

9.0%

Aside from Tyler Bozak (and Kessel may be a factor as he has only played with Bozak when Kessel is also on the ice), he has improved the shooting percentage of each of his line mates over the past 5 seasons. This is fairly significant evidence that Lupul is in fact a core player that improves the performance of his line mates.

Every team needs core players, but there aren’t enough core players in the NHL to fill out your roster so every team also needs quality complementary players. From my perspective, Kessel is a good complementary player that guys like Lupul and Savard can elevate into very good very productive players, but because Kessel is also dependent on Lupul to be highly productive, Kessel isn’t worth the money that you would pay a core player. For this reason, if I were the Leafs management, I’d be very cautious about paying Kessel big money (i.e. in excess of $7M) on his next contract since, if something happens to Lupul (as is the case right now) he quickly becomes ordinary.

Now with that in mind, and the fact he is currently on a significant goal drought (12 games dating back to last season, mostly without Lupul) I think it is up to the Leaf coaching staff to mix up the lines and see if you can find another core player that can maximize Kessel’s production. Bozak and van Riemsdyk don’t seem to be the guys. Personally, I’d put him with Grabovski but it might also be interesting to see him with young energy players like Kadri and Frattin. The coaching staff has to do something but the current line is not working at all.

Yesterday evening James Mirtle from the Globe and Mail posted an article on The Curious case of Tim Connolly and the Leafs. It’s worth a read so go read it but the premise of the article is how the narrative around Tim Connolly in training camp is he had a poor year last year and he needs to perform better this year. Makes sense from most peoples view points but Connolly tries to present a different perspective.

Connolly can be prickly to deal with and wasn’t particularly interested in talking about last season, but when pressed, you could tell he felt he did more of value than the narrative – that he’s been an unmitigated bust in Toronto – would suggest.

Here was his answer when asked (maybe for the second or third time) about needing to “rebound” this season.

“Even strength, I think I had my second highest career points last year,” Connolly said. “I’d like to improve my play on the power play and maybe play a bigger role. Penalty killing, I think, my individual percentage was 89 per cent I read somewhere. I was able to lead the forwards in blocked shots.”

He makes two points in there. The first is that he had his second highest even strength points last year and the second was something about individual percentage was 89 percent. Lets deal with the first one first by looking at his even strength points since the first lockout.

Season

Goals

Assists

Points

2011-12

11

20

31

2010-11

7

16

23

2009-10

9

27

36

2008-09

12

16

28

2007-08

3

20

23

2005-06

9

20

29

(Note: Connolly only played 2 games in 2006-07 so I have omitted it from the table and discussion)

Tim Connolly is actually correct. His best even strength point total came in 2009-10 when he had 36 points followed by his 31 even strength points last year. But let’s take a look at those point totals relative to even strength ice time.

Season

ESTOI

Points

TOI/Pt

2011-12

940:12

31

30:20

2010-11

840:31

23

36:33

2009-10

966:41

36

26:51

2008-09

631:26

28

22:33

2007-08

603:18

23

26:14

2005-06

708:47

29

24:26

The last column is time on ice per point, or time on ice between points. Last year he was on the ice for an average of 30 minutes and 20 seconds between each of his even strength points. This was his second worst since the locked out season. So, while Connolly was technically correct in saying that he had his second highest even strength point total last season, it was a somewhat misleading representation of his performance.

Now for the individual PK percent. It generated a bit of twitter conversation last night questioning what it actually is.

@67sound @mirtle Gotta love Connolly opposing the narrative with fancystats. Still no idea how the hell individual PK% works though.

One might think it is the penalty kill percentage when he was on the ice but that seems like a strange thing to calculate. Is it goals per 2 minutes of PK time? Is it goals per PK he spent any amount of time killing? I really didn’t know so I dug into the numbers deeper by looking at the Leafs PK percentages on my stats site and noticed that Connolly had the best on-ice save percentage (listed as lowest opposition shooting percentage) of any Leaf last season during 4v5 play and that save percentage while he was on the ice was just shy of 89% (88.68%). It seems that maybe what Connolly meant to say was that he had an on-ice PK save percentage of 89%.

How good is an 89% save percentage on the PK? Well, of the 100 forwards with at least 100 4v5 minutes of ice time last year, Connolly ranks 42nd in the league so league wide it isn’t that impressive but considering the Leafs weak goaltending it might actually be fairly good.

One could evaluate Connolly based on PK goals against rate in which he came up 3rd on the Leafs (trailing Lombardi or Kulemin) but that is still fraught with sample size issues. More fairly we probably should evaluate Connolly’s PK contribution based on shots against rate or maybe even more fairly fenwick or corsi against rates. In each of those categories he ranked 5th among Leafs with at least 50 minutes of 4v5 ice time with only Joey Crabb being worse. Furthermore, among the 110 players with 100 minutes of 4v5 PK ice time last year, Connolly ranked 99th in fenwick against rate.

I don’t mean for this article to be a Connolly bashing article. I actually do think Connolly was a little misused and would probably do better with a more well defined role and not bounced around in the line up so much so in that sense I agree with the premise of what Connolly is saying. With that said though, it probably is fair to say that he didn’t have a great season and if he wants a regular role in the top six with time on the PP and PK he needs to perform better as his use of stats to attempt to show he had a good season is really just evidence to how statistics can be misused to support almost any narrative you want. As they say, there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.

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Welcome to HockeyAnalysis.com, where I strive to get a better understanding of the game of hockey through the use of statistical analysis. I hope you enjoy whatever time you spend here and maybe even learn a little. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop me an e-mail at david (at) hockeyanalysis.com.